collage – Francesca Brooks

Writing with Scissors: Creative Workshops

This summer I’ve run several creative writing workshops that have all drawn in part on the idea of ‘writing with scissors’ and techniques of collage and assemblage. In May I ran an Ecopoetry workshop with St Nick’s Nature Reserve in York for members of the public (at the invitation of Becca Drake). In June I ran a workshop for practice-based PhD Researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University on ‘Exploring Possible Forms’, in collaboration with Special Collections at the institution. Then towards the end of June I co-ran a creative-critical translation workshop with Fran Allfrey and Carl Kears for our ‘Revoicing Medieval Poetry’ project. I would love to run more creative workshops and I’m open to invitations, so I thought I’d write a little record of just one of the workshops here – ‘Exploring Possible Forms’ – as a sort of advert and call out.

I’ve taken the phrase ‘writing with scissors’ from Ellen Gruber Garvey’s book Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance in which she writes about scrapbooking as a form of documentary or autobiography:

‘Every scrapbook holds its maker’s past and embodies a life of reading and saving. Every scrapbook is its own world, compelling and impossibly frustrating. […] Many scrapbooks are [also] diaries of sorts – a form of life writing that may or may not be chronological but records and preserves elements of life experience and memory cues.’ (pp. 14-5)

What Gruber Garvey points towards is the expressive possibilities of cutting out and assembling words and images, which can become a form of life-writing, but might also work as a documentary record or even as a space for fantasy and play. I’ve used some of these techniques myself – as an embodied research response to working with the scrapbooks of Edwin Morgan, for example, or as a way of writing about my longing to be by the sea in moments of landlock and writer’s block. For the ‘Exploring Possible Forms’ workshop I wanted to offer practice-based researchers an exploratory and collaborative space in which they would be encouraged to find new and embodied ways of approaching the writing they do for their PhD research.

Detail of the inside cover of Scrapbook 234 in the Harry Robertson Page Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections

The other jumping off point was that Louise Clennell in Special Collections had offered to co-run something for our researchers. Louise would introduce us to some of MMU’s amazing collection of artists’ books, while my eye had been caught by some of the nineteenth-century scrapbooks that were on display as part of a temporary exhibition in the museum. The scrapbooks were collected by Harry Page in the twentieth century before being donated to the university. Page was a City Treasurer for Manchester Council and a Victorian ephemera and scrap fanatic: his collection is incredibly rich and varied. I was struck by how surreal and strange the pages displayed from scrapbooks 88 and 157 of the Harry Page Collection were, and the extent to which their playful quality (verging on Dada-esque, proto-collage) chimed with my own experiments with cut-out text and collage methods of writing.

As part of my preparation for the workshop, I spent a couple of afternoons in Special Collections with some of the Harry Page Scrapbooks, as selected by the librarians and archivists. Scrapbook 88, produced by one ‘Mary Watson’ in the 1820s or 30s, was the star of the selections. The faded blue, sugary pages of this scrapbook were filled with words, phrases and notes cut from diverse sources and rearranged haphazardly, sometimes in idiosyncratic little clusters. Something like a story began to develop in the detail of these clusters and across the pages, although the fragments of text were often so free-floating, disjointed and bizarrely laid out that it felt like you were reading a document written in code. The scrapbook begins with a handwritten letter, a kind of epistolary set-up for the fiction of the book, suggesting that it had been received by Mary Watson from the Bishop of Halam. A mystery unfolds in the clippings and clusters of concrete poetry that follow. Although not easy to decipher, the scrapbook is nevertheless fascinating for the glimpse it seems to give into a mind busy at creative work. Who was this book for? What was being communicated to a potential reader? What was being documented?

Detail from Scrapbook 88, Harry Page Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections

Page-spread from Scrapbook 88, Harry Page Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections

During the workshop researchers had the chance to explore the ‘possible forms’ opened up by the artists’ books selected by Louise Clennell and some of the scrapbooks from the Harry Page Collection. For the more practical ‘making’ and ‘writing’ part of the workshop, I had asked the researchers to bring along a text they were working with as part of their PhD – this could be the abstract (description) of their own project, some writing they were currently stuck on, or a key text in their reading. We then began by cutting up and deconstructing this text, rearranging words and phrases to form a new, short text. I encouraged participants to work impulsively and associatively, without worrying about sentence structure, sense or grammar.

Next I directed participants to the other materials that had been brought into the room: old magazines, newspapers, books and journals that were available to them as a resource for words and images. They were now invited to create a visio-verbal composition over an extended period of time, which would develop or respond to the text they had created in the first half of the exercise. I drew on the words of Maria Carolina Cambre, who writes that: ‘Crucial to the art-making process is the ceding of control and allowing things to happen’. In collage, she adds, choices and emergent possibilities ‘are exceptionally abundant, with each torn edge having a fractal-like virtual presence inviting responses.’ Participants were encouraged to stray and cede control to these multiplying possibilities.

A screenshot of photographs of collages created by the researchers during the workshop

The image above shows some pictures of collages created during the workshop, which researchers have since sent to me. It’s no surprise that their responses should be so varied and beautiful, given how many of the participants were practising artists, designers and writers. This summer I’ve really enjoyed playing with collage and cut-up techniques with a range of different audiences. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk more about a potential workshop.

Creative Re-creation and Translation: Edwin Morgan, Derek Jarman & the archive

Last month, ahead of the launch of issue 15.2, two pieces I wrote or co-wrote were published with postmedieval: a journal of medieval culture studies. Both gave me the opportunity to write and think more about Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks in the University of Glasgow Archives, and to reflect on how my month spent with them in 2022 has continued to shape my creative and critical practice.

For the first piece, ‘Medieval re-creation and translation in the archives of Derek Jarman and Edwin Morgan: A Dialogue’, I spent several months corresponding with the artist and writer E. K. Myerson over email in a kind of ‘show and tell’. As our creative-critical conversation unfolded in 2023, we discussed the queer medievalisms of Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman, and reflected on what it means to be a medievalist working in a modern archive where we might feel more intimately connected with the touch and desires of the subjects of our research. In the second half of our conversation we shared how we had each responded creatively to our encounter with the archive: I, by making a Glasgow scrapbook of collage pages and page-spreads, and Myerson by working on a Jarmanesque film called ‘A submerged reliquary of a Kentish saint’.

Screenshot of one of Morgan’s scrapbook pages published in the postmedieval article

The second piece I wrote was an ‘About the Cover’ text, after postmedieval‘s editors asked if they could use one of Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook page-spreads on the cover of the issue. This was a really enjoyable invitation to spend more time slowly and closely reading a single page from the vast and unruly scrapbooks (3600 pages in total). I let myself be drawn in by a single image from Scrapbook 1, a panel from the early-eighth-century Franks Casket, and wondered (in a speculative and open-ended sense) if this might be the key to unlocking the whole composition.

Morgan’s use of an image from the Casket is a knowing and playful gesture. It invites us to actively engage with the tangled material of the scrapbook page-spread. A reader of the scrapbooks forges new connections as they move around the page and through the books via different routes. There is no one way to read or unlock the scrapbook page. We should revel in its riddling multiplicity.

Huge thanks are due here to Hannah Armstrong and Rebecca Menmuir who organised a workshop on Medieval Forgeries in 2022, where I met E. K. Myerson, and then invited us all to contribute to a Forgeries Essay cluster for postmedieval journal. They have been brilliant editors and collaborators.

I haven’t stopped thinking and working with Morgan’s scrapbooks yet – last week I co-ran a workshop with Fran Allfrey and Carl Kears (as part of Revoicing Medieval Poetry) at the IONA conference at King’s College London, where I led an exercise inspired by Morgan’s techniques of scrapbooking, assemblage and collage.

Collages in response to the Old English Pharoah poem made by Lisa Weston (left) and Heather Maring (right)

In the workshop I asked how the material/tactile/visual process of collage might allow us to explore the outer-reaches of a text we were beginning to translate from Old English into new language? How might working associatively and impulsively with found visual and verbal materials (old magazines, newspapers and books) inform the subterranean architecture of a translation? The workshop was really enjoyable, and it’s formed one of a series I’ve run this summer exploring collage poetry, cut-up text, and writing with scissors, in York, Manchester and London. I would love to run more creative workshops like this – so feel free to be in touch if you have a budget and this is of interest!

Word and Image – sleeping, dreaming, floating

I’ve continued to experiment with the playful, irreverent and sometimes associative relationship between word and image in ‘collage poems’. The process of making them can be brief and impulsive, but often extends over a long period of time, and might be seen as an iterative process.

Although I was away when they were published, Ink, Swear and Tears, featured two of these collage poems in their Word & Image curation back in February – ‘Octopus’ and ‘To Sleep’.

‘Octopus’ published with Ink, Sweat and Tears

I’ve included an image of ‘Octopus’ above, which transforms the balletic tangle of limbs into a vision of an octopus. ‘To Sleep’ is another kind of visio-verbal fantasy of the luxuries of decadent, dream-filled sleep. Huge thanks to Kayleigh Jayshree and the team at Ink, Sweat & Tears for choosing these pieces for the feature!

A collage poem that I made as a birthday gift for my mum, also on the subject of dreaming, was featured on Sophie Herxheimer and W. N. Herbert’s Ghost Furniture Catalogue all the way back in August of last year. It’s titled ‘Fantasy Bed Collage’ and you can read it/view it/meditate on it here.

Detail from the ‘Fantasy Bed Collage’ published with Ghost Furniture Catalogue

The Ghost Furniture Catalogue continues to advertise an open call: ‘Poems needed to wallpaper skulls and fit out rattling minds’.

I’m hoping that this year I’ll have more time to think deeply and critically about how the visual and the verbal intertwines in my writing practice, and what a body of work on this subject might look like.

Beachcombed Assemblages

I’ve been referring to these ‘creations’ as photo collage poems, but it occurs to me now that this is a little unwieldy in its eclectic hybridisation of forms. So, some of my ‘beachcombed assemblages’ have been published by SJ Fowler over on 3AM Magazine as part of the Poem Brut series. You can read/view them here.

Screenshot of the assemblages as they appear on 3AM Magazine

These little artefacts and poem-objects combine photographs of things encountered on the beach with found text arranged on the surface of the photo in a kind of collage. I began making them when I was struggling with writers’ block and longing to be by the sea, as if the unrequited impulse to walk the coast was somehow tied up with the frustrated impulse to write.

The Poem Brut series is a real treasure trove of visual poetry and poem-objects. Here is Jules Sprake with forms that combine printmaking and poetry, ink sculptures by Agata Maslowska, stitched found visual poetry by Laura Davis, palimpsests, typewriter poems, asemic writing and much more. You can explore the full Poem Brut archive here.

Here’s the text I wrote to accompany my three beachcombed assemblages:

Each of these visual poems is a multitemporal document that begins with a walk on a beach in search of objects of interest to photograph and ends with the beachcombing of a collection of found texts in search of phrases. These found phrases, reassembled on the surface of the photograph, re-enliven the images during periods of time when I am far from the beach and longing to return. In moments of landlock and heightened desire for the meditative pleasures of walking the coastline, I return to my photographs. These photographs are a part of the record I keep of rare beach walks. When I return to this record in my Manchester flat, it gives me a renewed sense of the surreal and mysterious quality of things encountered at the edge of the tide. The collage poems I create on the surface of these photographs are responsive but also impulsive: they rely on a randomness that is in tune with the chance discoveries made on the beach.
Poem Brut #159

From Glasgow to Saturn Collage Poems

The 50th Anniversary issue of the Glasgow Journal From Glasgow to Saturn has a selection of collage poems by me in it. The journal takes its name from a 1976 poetry collection by Scottish Makar, poet and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Edwin Morgan, and this edition is something of a tribute, or a response to him.

Picture shows copies of the journal ‘From Glasgow to Saturn’ laid over my sketchbook of collages and collage poems.

My poems for the journal – ‘Floating Curious’, ‘She wants you to glide’, and ‘Cliffs and Crags’ – are all ‘collage poems’, works of visual poetry that combine found text and imagery to create something new and surreal. I started creating collage poems during the pandemic, but it was really a research fellowship working with the scrapbooks of Edwin Morgan at the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections, that saw this method of poetic making flourish and develop.

Morgan worked on his scrapbooks between 1931 and 1966. They are huge compendiums of literary quotations, found imagery, newspaper clippings, Morgan’s own drawings and dream journals; vast, tentacular maps of the poet and translator’s creative mind at work. It was a struggle to make sense of them as a researcher, but creatively poring over the pages had me fizzing to try out the process myself. I bought a hardbound sketchbook, a pair of scissors, and a stick of glue from Cass Art in the centre of Glasgow and started gathering printed materials with which I might create my own scrapbooks during the evenings of my fellowship.

One of the collage poems, ‘Cliffs and Crag’s, published in From Glasgow to Saturn’. You will have to buy a copy of the journal to see the rest.

Working with Morgan’s scrapbooks has encouraged an interest in collage and visual poetry more broadly. I have been following 3am Magazine’s Poem Brut series, and really enjoyed reading Emma Filtness’s incredible collection The Venus Atmosphere, published by Steel Incisors (visual poetry press ‘with teeth’). One of my friends is also a wonderful collage artist and constant source of inspiration, Laura Mipsum, and in Manchester I have been to a Collage Club run by Local Hotel Parking, which introduced me to the joys of a good scalpel and cutting mat! I’m also grateful to Johanna Green, who not only welcomed me to Glasgow by introducing me to the delicious Little Italy Pizzeria but also encouraged me to think a bit more about visual poetry.

If there are any visual poets or collage artists you follow, I would love to hear about it in the comments below!

Flat lay showing my collage poem ‘Floating Curious’

Close-up of some of the found text in ‘Floating Curious’

Scrapbooking Old English with Edwin Morgan

I spent March in Glasgow for a Research Fellowship with the Archives and Special Collections of the University Library, long delayed from 2020 because of the pandemic. I had been dreaming of Glasgow for a long time, often through the poetry of Scots Makar and Glasgow Laureate Edwin Morgan, whose archive my fellowship research was focused on.

Glasgow’s iconic Duke of Wellington statue with a cone on his head, and a seagull on the horse’s rear. The cone is yarn-bombed with the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

This week the Library published a blogpost that I wrote about my work with Morgan’s ‘vast, unruly and magnificent’ scrapbooks and their relationship to the early medieval poetry, such as Beowulf, that Morgan was translating in the early part of his career.

[In the scrapbooks] medieval fragments jostle for space alongside pictures of jellyfish, sea anemones and goose barnacles, photographs of blasted snow-bound mountains, or surreptitious allusions to queer desire, as well as news items about cosmic rays and potential radio transmissions intercepted from outer space.
Scrapbooking old english – ‘the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush’

MS Morgan C/1 p225-226 – this double-page spread shows a print of a jellyfish facing a panel from the early medieval Franks Casket

Putting together the blogpost and going back over my research notes made me realise just how much I had to say about Morgan’s scrapbooks. If Morgan’s desire for his translations of medieval texts was that ‘the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush’, this had certainly been the effect on me of the visio-verbal scrapbooks and collages. Perhaps I will try and find another venue to write about the inspiration my research with Morgan provided for my own evening collage sessions in Glasgow.